JUN-B-3
LAUNCH
THE HAITI TRIP FROM DERWOOD TO BWI
THROUGH FORT LAUDERDALE FL FOR THE MIAMI CONTINGENT,
AND
JOIN FORCES TO PREPARE FOR
THE
THOMONDE MEDICAL MISSION
June 6-7, 2003
Aboard Air Tran 495 with Brain Schaaf, Danielle Foster, and Yvonne Turiy, I have made it here from a very sodden Derwood in a heavy rain to take off now to open the first limb of our two flight hop toward Haiti. The taxi driver who had driven us back from the Senate office building yesterday afternoon lightened up when I had talked with the others about the names of the sites I would be visiting in Haiti, as it turns out he was Haitian, having left Port au Prince eighteen years ago. But the site of Thumonde he had never heard of, nor the village of Cange which is a three hour walk away—so I must be headed to a remote valley. I am sitting across from Bryan Shaaaf, whose past history includes a term at this area as a Peace Corps Volunteer, who had made initial contacts with Paul Farmer, whom I have known from his long term interest in Haiti at the Cange site. Brian is an MPH student at GW, and hooked up with Project MediShare, based out of the University of Miami where we will be stopping to pick up the other members of the team that will be going down to make our “Health Fair” village screening clinic visits. Danielle Foster is the freshman GWUMC medical student who had found me and talked of going with me on one of my future trips to Asia or Africa, but had recruited her classmate to accompany us in this venture for which she had made the arrangements with my permission when I was out in Malawi.
Ellen Powers is the woman who has coordinated these visits and she left today for Haiti and we will be staying at the home of her significant other in Fort Lauderdale before we are driven to MIA tomorrow morning to begin our flight to Haiti on American Airlines, and a long road trip on a rural Haitian road to get to the area of Thumonde. Ellen Powers had typed up a schedule for the week that reached me yesterday when I met with the students at noon before I left of r the US Senate. It shows that we are booked for A and B teams for morning and afternoon clinics, and she also has the evenings programmed for lectures from the preceptors the first of which is mine the evening of our arrival in Haiti. We will make a day trip over to Cange when Paul Farmer is there so that this may help us get started on the collaboration we have long been attempting At least one of these collaborations has been to get him to come to the GWUMC MTM Department as visiting professor and consultant in our plans to develop the Global Health Institute which was also the discussion point of our visit with Senator First’s office yesterday afternoon.
So, this is a rainy wet start for an adventure which has been long overdue to the “local Africa” in my own hemisphere. I will have to start hearing Creole to understand some of the problems and potential solutions at the site of Haiti’s poorest of the poor.
One thing we may be able to contribute which I heard would be in high demand would be journals for the Cange hospital library, particularly if these journals were on the subjects of Tropical Medicine and surgery. So, I scooped up the last four years of my American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene journals along with all the Journals of the American College of Surgeons and have three boxes of these journals checked into the hold of this Air Tran DC-9 now to drop off with our colleagues there. I myself have only the medium size back pack from my last year’s trip to India, and the usual carry-on containing this laptop, which may only contain as much as twenty minutes battery life. But, I will try to get re-charged at our stateside stop, and then see if I can trust the generator to not blow through the surge protector on the laptop’s charger and keep you in formed thereby with the actions of this first Project Medishare Haitian Medical Mission.
ARRIVAL
IN FORT LAUDERDALE AND TRANSFER TO MIAMI
FOR OUR OVERNIGHT STAGING AREA,
HOSTED BY DRS. GREEN AND FOURNIER,
PROJECT MEDISHARE’S ORIGINATORS
Bryan Shaaf, one of the four of our GW contingent, was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the area of Thurmonde, where we will be working. In that capacity, he had met the two docs who will be with us as well as a few others who have been recruited: a cardiac surgeon named Moreno, and a community internist named Raj Patel. There also will be some folk from the Miami Herald who will be reporting this trip. There are 17 students from the University of Miami, and a contingent from Northwestern University Medical School, where Jeremy Green, Barth’s son, has just finished his freshman year—about the same stage as all the other medical students on the trip. So, this is like the screening clinics we will have in the next session with the India HHE excursions. I am giving a talk to the group on the evening of our arrival in Haiti at our destination in Thumonde—a hairy rainy season road journey from Port au Prince, our destination on the flight from Miami.
Barth Green picked us up in a Mercedes, which held all our stuff including the packs of medical journals. We were taken to his home, which is an exclusive gated community not far from Jackson Memorial where he works as a neurosurgeon. It did not take long to hear that Larry Page3, who was a pediatric neurosurgeon in Boston Children’s when I was there and had left to come down to Miami, was his just-retired partner. I had been ushered into his elegant home on the Biscayne Bay with the pool in front overlooking the waterway that has been the TV backdrop of Miami Vice, and with neighbors that are either judges, other doctors or well-paid base3vball players. We sorted out our stuff and I had a guest room of my own where I vegged with the persistent plague of my Washington DC environment cold which has followed me down here to make me febrile, listless, headachy and with a constantly running nose. Outside in the hot and humid conditions of the Miami summer weather, it is too hot, and inside in the air conditioning, it is refrigerated and too cold. I hope to get beyond this annoyance soon, and will try to shake this off in the early parts of the transit toward our goal in Haiti.
Jeremy is the medical student of the three kids, and Jared is going to be a Miami medical student after his “wanderjahr” in New York. There is also a daughter Jenna, a beautiful teenager, looking like a Glamour cover girl, for which she has posed. This is a very wealthy area of Miami, and it is refreshing to see, that, for whatever reasons, these people are very concerned for the welfare and development of the Haitian neighbors for whom they had organized this Project MediShare, and have bought a lot of things to carry down with us—like microscopes, a TV and VHS, as well as a lot of things that will remain behind. From the privileged students who are still coming in on delayed flights from several sources, to get a total of 31 of them in a group to man the screening clinics.
ABOARD
AMERICAN AIRLINES 377,
FLIGHT ON AN AIRBUIS 300 TO PORT AU PRINCE,
HAITI
I am aloft amid a group of Creole speaking Haitians who have the usual group of kids kicking the seat backs and the women wearing four straw hats simultaneously. We are heading into an area where the patricians speak French and the people speak Creole. The government of Haiti is the re-instated democratically elected former priest Aristide, who was put back in power through intervention by the US Army. But, there is now a problem in that Aristede, former priest notwithstanding, is as corrupt as anyone else in that position and has done a lot of siphoning of the US aid. So there is an Aid Embargo for good reasons, and the people, as always, are the ones who suffer from the misdeeds of the leadership. There is not very much difference between the Haitian example, and, say, the kleptocracy of ex-Zaire, and the common denominator for the rest of the population impacted by these malfeasances is a deepening desperate poverty. The Haitian example can be our own little bit of desperate Africa next door in this hemisphere.
I will learn a lot more of this status very shortly, as I make my way along the easy part (this American Airlines flight) and the tougher part (the road trip thorough the rainy season Haitian backloads.) I will be in Thumonde tonight, where I am booked to give a lead-off talk to the students about what to expect in the generic poor areas—a title could be “The Epidemiology of Poverty.” It is not different in many ways from almost all the far flung areas I have treated as a “Bottom Feeder.” A number of the wealthy first-worlders are here perhaps as a conscience salve for the abundance that they have luxuriated in for some long time, and a few others may seek to get a newer appreciation of what they already have. After those initial impressions, we have to get beyond that and ask “OK, now what are you going to DO about it?” We will see if any of the 31 students and a few of their preceptors can come up with any answers to such a question.